Everything Counts!

"How you do anything is how you'll do everything." I heard or read this phrase in the last 24 hours or so, and it has really stuck with me. (Perhaps all the reading on mindfulness is sinking in!) I wish I could remember the source of this quote, so I could give proper credit and attribution where it's due. Ah, well. My sincere apologies to the originator, whoever and wherever you are.

This phrase teaches me an important lesson: that whatever level of attention, energy, presence, and mindfulness I bring to one activity will tend to be reflected in the other aspects of my life. Watch how I brush my teeth, tie my shoes, or perform a kata, and you're likely to see similarities in how I sign my name on a check, drive my car, or talk with and listen to my wife and kids.

Everything counts. If my life is my dojo, then I'm always in training. Therefore, virtually everything I do is practice. All I need to do is add awareness. So instead of driving my car mindlessly during my commute, perhaps I should attempt to practice driving. Instead of shaving as part of my morning routine, perhaps I could practice shaving as an extension of my life's ART.

The path toward mastery and greater awareness is always right now, and right here, beneath our feet.

Sensei Jason Gould
Emerald Necklace Martial Arts
http://www.karateinboston.com/

Attrition, Retention, and All the While, the World Goes Round and Round

The above photo was taken at my dojo about two years ago, following a special "all-ranks" workout. Not all dojo members were present for the event, of course, but those who were there represented a pretty good cross-section of our diverse dojo's adult membership: men, women, younger, older, black, white, and everywhere in between. I'm lucky and proud to have such a wonderful rainbow of people on the dojo floor.

Twenty-four people were present for training that day, including me. Nearly two years later, only eleven of those pictured are still actively training and fully participating dojo members. Many who were not pictured above were dojo members back when the photo was taken, and they are still training at the dojo today. Others are training today who were not members of the dojo back when the the photo was taken. And still there is another set of people: those who joined the dojo and stopped their training in the two years between when the photo was taken and today.

People start training in the martial arts for a thousand different reasons. Folks enter a dojo because they want confidence, increased fitness, self-defense skills, a sense of community, something new and fun and interesting to do — the list goes on and on. Many people stop training, I suppose, for just as many reasons: they get bored, they change or lose a job, they fall in love, they move, they get pregnant, priorities and interests change.

The bottom line is that at a dojo, people (many, many, many people, in fact) will come and go. This has been a hard lesson for me to learn and to accept, as I hope (sometimes I expect) that anyone who joins the dojo will be here for the long haul. It's an unrealistic, expectation, I know.

I look out across the dojo floor on any given training night, and I know that the chances are that some of the people there that night will, for one reason or another, eventually go their own way. I feel like a parent who dreads the looming day when their beloved child will move out and move on.

This is the way of our people.

I look back through photos like these from time to time, and there are many names that I'll never forget. Sadly, there are also names that I'll never remember. But every time a new student walks in the door and steps onto the floor for his or her first class — looking awkward in their bright and shiny gi fresh from the package — the cycle starts anew, and I am renewed and refreshed and blessed by the opportunity to do what I love to do.